Episode 94: Agriculture

u like food? u like eating that food? u want 2 know the real dill about ag? ;) WELL GIDDY UP! This week we have incredible crop scientist, Sarah Taber, on the ep! Check it out as she eviscerates any and all agricultural myths u may have in your brain! Theme music as always by Brandon Payton Carrillo Links for the people Broiler chicken farmers make way more money that anyone admits: https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2014/august/financial-risks-and-incomes-in-contract-broiler-production/ Farmers in general make more money than non-farming Americans & have since the mid-90s: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-household-well-being/income-and-wealth-in-context/ (Translate: yes, working-class farmers exist, and they’re still a lot better off than their non-farming working class peers. Meanwhile white-collar farmers, who also exist, are doing quite well.) The USDA does a farm census every 10 years or so; the 1920 one gets referenced the most often bc it was the high-water mark for number of farmers in the US. (Which folks take to mean it’s “normal” except it wasn’t- farmer numbers were artificially inflated by super high food prices during World War I driving a lot of speculative investment & one last gasp of homesteading in places where there’s no way it could actually work. It’s how the Dust Bowl happened.) Anyway, check out how much sharecropping was happening in the Great Plains & Midwest. http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/AgCensusImages/1920/Farm_Statistics_By_Color_and_Tenure.pdf A whole bunch of farmers talking about how the “thank a farmer” grandstanding is toxic & just exacerbates ag culture’s worst tendencies: https://www.porkbusiness.com/article/kate-miller-i-will-not-thank-farmer https://futureofag.com/why-i-dont-promote-thank-a-farmer-rhetoric-bee1378c490a https://www.achieveag.com.au/single-post/2017/04/30/Dont-thank-a-farmer https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/sask-farmer-thank-a-farmer-nonsense-1.4945273 https://www.agweb.com/top-producer/article/perspective_a_declaration_of_interdependence-john-phipps/